1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments discussed herein are directed to an apparatus and method for radio communication under the condition where some constraints on transmit power levels are applied for each transmit antenna or each group of transmit antennas in multi-user MIMO downlinks.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, a MIMO (Multiple-Input Multiple-Output) transmission scheme has been intensively investigated for improvement of frequency or spectral efficiency and increase in communication capacity. In this MIMO transmission scheme, a multi-user (MU)-MIMO system designed to apply the MIMO transmission scheme to multiple users for further improvement of the spectral efficiency is attracting attention. Furthermore, a system designed for MU-MIMO coordinated base stations transmission is being studied, and it is reported that it can realize significant improvement of throughput.
In this MU-MIMO coordinated base stations transmission system, since different power amplifiers are used for different antennas of base stations or different base stations, respective characteristics of the power amplifiers must be taken into account. Particularly if data streams transmitted from users are precoded based on feedback information such as channel information supplied from the users, the levels of transmit power allocated for the different streams transmitted from the users depending on precoding weights of transmit antennas must be adjusted each time of updating the feedback information such as the channel information because of constraints on transmit power imposed on the base stations.
A first article G. J. Foschini, K. Karakayali and R. A. Valenzuela, “Coordinating multiple antenna cellular networks to achieve enormous spectral efficiency”, IEE Proceedings Communications, vol. 153, No. 4, pp. 548-555, August 2006 discloses that block diagonalization zero-forcing, which is a precoding scheme designed for transmission without interference among individual users, is used in a MU-MIMO coordinated base stations transmission system in consideration of respective characteristics of individual power amplifiers to propose and solve a transmit power optimization problem that can realize uniform allocation of channel capacity to individual users. In this article, it is also shown that this approach can significantly improve the channel capacity compared to systems without the coordination among base stations.
A second article S. Liu, N. Hu, Z. He, K. Niu and W. Wu, “Multi-level zero-forcing method for multiuser downlink system with per-antenna power constraint”, VTC 2007-Spring, pp. 2248-2252, April 2007 discloses optimization problems for optimizing transmit weights and transmit power for precoding in the above MU-MIMO coordinated base stations transmission system such that the channel capacity of the overall system can be maximized. In this article, it is also shown that this approach can improve the channel capacity.
A third article W. Yu and T. Lan, “Transmitter optimization for the multi-antenna downlink with per-antenna power constraints”, IEEE Trans., Signal Processing, pp. 2646-2660, June 2007 discloses an optimization problem using duality of uplink and downlink and a solution method in the above MU-MIMO coordinated base stations transmission system.
The power allocation optimization problems as stated above correspond to constrained nonlinear optimization problems, and higher computational complexity may be required to solve them. For example, in the case where the power allocation optimization problems are solved with use of an interior point method in accordance with a steepest descent method, the solution can be analytically obtained in a relatively simple algorithm, but higher computational complexity may be required for convergence.
The first and second articles, however, have no investigation on reduction in the computational complexity for solving the optimization problems as proposed in the articles.
Also, the third article is directed to only linear precoding and makes no mention of nonlinear precoding.